The International Standards Organization (ISO) has established the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) Reference Model. The OSI Reference Model provides a network design framework allowing equipment from different vendors to be able to communicate. More specifically, the OSI Reference Model organizes the communication process into seven layers of protocol. Layer 1 is referred to as the physical layer, which is responsible for handling electrical, optical, opto-electrical, and mechanical requirements for interfacing to the communication media. Notably, the physical layer may facilitate the transfer of electrical signals representing an information bit stream. The physical layer may also provide services such as, for example, encoding, decoding, synchronization, clock data recovery, and transmission and reception of bit streams.
As the demand for higher data rates and bandwidth continues to increase, networks may be upgraded by replacing older, slower switches with higher speed switches. For example, Gigabit Ethernet (GbE), which initially found application in gigabit servers, is becoming widespread in personal computers, laptops, and switches, thereby providing the necessary infrastructure for handling data traffic for PCs and servers. Hence, a network may replace a 1 GbE switch with a 10 GbE switch. However, there may be instances when a user's network layer 1 equipment cannot take advantage of a higher speed network switch.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the art, through comparison of such systems with some aspects of the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.